Re: Does GNUstep infringe on Apple's Intellectual Property?

[Jeff Teunissen]

John Anderson wrote:
> 
> I am not yet an expert on software copyright law, but I think that
> Apple's copyrights on OpenStep and Cocoa give it, at least, owner of
> the all the object names and methods under the "NS" prefix.
> Furthermore, I doubt  that simple changing the "NS" to something like
> "GS" would stand up in US Federal court for long.  Apple's copyrights
> could be interpreted broadly and generally.

You are correct, you are not an expert on IP law.

OpenStep®, the specification, was © 1994 NeXT Software, Inc. in
association with Sun Microsystems. GNUstep is an implementation of this
specification and not a derivative work of it, as 12 USC defines the term.

To be a derivative work of OpenStep, GNUstep would have had to include
"expressive" (non-"functional") portions of OpenStep, verbatim, in its
code. The class and method names are functional characteristics of the
specification (they are application programming interfaces), and must be
present for the resultant software to be interoperable. As functional
characteristics, there is no copyright on the APIs laid out in the
document, only on the document itself and the expressive text in it.

Further, it is not a violation of copyright to use a copyrighted document
(in this case, the OpenStep specification) to implement a compatible (or
incompatible, for that matter) system. Copyright covers copying, and it
DOES NOT APPLY to the names of things nor into their functional
characteristics (the "how it works" part). Full stop, there's no wiggle
room there. Apple have not established a trade mark for those names, have
not sought such protection, and now it is too late for them to do so.

The front-piece of the OpenStep specification says that the document does
not give permission to develop an implementation of OpenStep, but it
neglects to mention that such permission is not required -- APIs cannot be
copyrighted. In other words, it is a convenient (for NeXT) fiction to say
that the specification does not imply permission to develop.

Patents are another thing entirely. It's possible that GNUstep's
implementation infringes on one or more patents held by Apple. They do
have a lot of stupid patents under their collective belt.

> I mean that to the extent that software has not been "patentable,"
> copyright is being used in a more abstract sense.  This is increasing
> happening on US college campus, where students and scholars are using
> US copyright law to protect themselves from having their work stolen by
> plagiarists.

I think you mean "professors", not "plagiarists".

[snip]

By the way, don't top-post. It's annoying and breaks threaded discussions.

-- 
| Jeff Teunissen  -=-  Pres., Dusk To Dawn Computing  -=-  deek @ d2dc.net
| GPG: 1024D/9840105A   7102 808A 7733 C2F3 097B  161B 9222 DAB8 9840 105A
| Core developer, The QuakeForge Project        http://www.quakeforge.net/
| Specializing in Debian GNU/Linux              http://www.d2dc.net/~deek/